This is an awareness test

Say cheese!

I got my new camera today! It’s a refurbished Canon Digital Ixus 95 in a super nice shade of blue! I bought it (together with a 4GB memory card) for £88 on ebay – even less than half the original retail price (around £180) which does not include any memory cards! After I confirmed that my old Casio camera was really dead (some water entered it when my water bottle leaked in my bag one fateful day when I was in lake district), my initial plan was to wait till I return to Singapore and get a new one back home, where there are people around who know so much more about this stuff, since I’m quite rubbish at electronic products anyway. But just a few days ago, I received an email from Amazon about their summer sales, and saw that they were selling brand new pink Canon Digital Ixus 95 at £99, which seems like a really good deal! So I began clicking around to find out more about this camera model, and read many good reviews about it. The reviews always sound so persuasive and convincing! There are flaws, of course, but I don’t even need super wide angles or super high resolution (in fact 7.2 megapixels was already more than enough for me), so I didn’t bother looking for newer, better models. Then I realized that it also comes in blue, and it’s a shade of blue which I fell in love with instantly! Too bad the Amazon sale was only for the pink one. Further sourcing led me to find out about refurbished cameras, which I was initially quite scared of buying – simply because it was so much cheaper – but ended up setting my mind on it anyway – also simply because it was so much cheaper! After I read a review about the things to look out for in buying refurbished products, I decided to just give it a go, or there’s no way I’ll find out whether these refurbished products are really as good as new! And indeed, it’s in mint condition! The colour is just as I imagined as well! It’s also really tiny and nice to carry around. I’m so happy that I now have a decent camera to snap photos of things here and at my Japanese teacher’s wedding as well!

This is my very first test shot! I was at my desk at work. These are protocols for RNA and protein isolation, first-strand cDNA kits and real-time PCR arrays which I follow, and a nice lab diary for the results.

With a new camera, it’s also time to say good bye. Bye bye my pink Casio. You have been most faithful and reliable the past 3 years, and we have shared so many good times together. You were given to me by my sisters as a farewell present before I left for the UK, and that itself is more than enough reason to make me sad when I realized that you are beyond repair. You have been so hardy in spite of all that abuse that I subjected you to; you survived the snow in Tignes, you were fine even after falling so many times in so many different places because of my butter fingers, and you even managed to come back with a flicker of life (upon some coaxing) after landing on that concrete floor in Vienna. If I were you, I would have died a long time ago in the hands of such an owner. Thank you for seeing me through these years in foreign lands, and for all the moments in time that you have made forever. This time, you must have drunk too much water. I hope you are resting well. If you ever wake up from your concussion one day, don’t be jealous of blue Canon. You will always be special, because you’re the first camera I ever had.

I emailed my family to tell them that I bought a new camera, and this was my father’s reply:

好好照顾相机，不好让他口渴，ok

HAHAHAHAHA. I burst out laughing when I saw the email. My papa is too cute.

Another random happy thing: I bought a T-shirt at Sainsbury’s for 10p today!!! It’s officially the cheapest T-shirt I have! I think they sold these during the World Cup season, which has left no traces in this country by this time.. 1966 was the first time England won the World Cup. But this year, they were really really miles away from relieving that glory..

The place where wishes come true

We cry when something is sad. Then we often shed a tear when something's beautiful as well. When something is funny or ugly, we laugh. Perhaps we are sad when something is beautiful because we know that it won't last for ever.
- Jostein Gaardner, Through a Glass, Darkly

Clannad and its After Story form the best anime that I’ve ever watched in my life. Really, it is this amazing. The last time I cried so much while watching a show was probably during One Litre of Tears, which was so heartwrenching and touching that every episode was literally a tearjerker. I don’t know how these cartoon characters in Clannad made me cry so much and so hard that my eyes hurt. Be it happy moments, sad moments, or bittersweet moments, some scenes are just.. too exquisitely beautiful. At times, a mere song was all it took for the tears to fall. One day, maybe ten years later, I may find myself rewatching this entire series and looking back on these younger days with nostalgia. As much as my feelings towards the characters and perceptions of the story may change with time, I know that there will always be the same timeless parts, where I’ll laugh and cry my heart out all over again, no matter how many ten years later.

Day before yesterday I saw a rabbit, and yesterday a deer, and today, you.

My after-lab and before-sleep hours are spent on drama marathons, because there really isn't much alternative entertainment in this town. It's been a while since I can watch dramas with no abandon, and it feels so good to be able to finish watching what I have long been wanting to watch!

I finished watching black&white aka pi zi ying xiong on Sunday! This action drama practically doubled my average heart rate and gave me so many nonsensical nightmares. The show centres around these two officers who are polar opposites in character -and hence black and white-, working together to make sense of the heinous crimes that plague their country. It's not a typical Taiwanese ou xiang ju (though it is abound with many shuai ges, like my favourite xiao ma!!!), and in many ways similar to Mars, this show has emerged to be so much better than the stereotype. The plot is absolutely insane, but it is just so compelling. I don't usually appreciate action movies and thrillers as much because they almost always focus too much on creating all that rush and excitement via plots full of twists and turns, without much room for character development. So to me, they seldom leave strong impressions and are easily forgotten. Maybe because black&white is a drama instead of a movie, there is so much more time to mould the characters into shape, and sometimes I feel so attached to some of the characters that I almost feel as if we were fighting on the same front against the same enemy together. I also like how the recurring theme of black vs white penetrates all elements of the show; not just in terms of characters, but also the plot, and the many juxtapositions and contradictions about how clear-cut life is (or is not).

When the drama ended, it left me feeling so empty, and to quench all withdrawal symptoms, I continued watching Clannad, an anime that is so beautiful and touching, and simply hilarious at times. I'm almost reaching the end of Season 1, and I really like it so much. Many video comments say that the After Story, which is the sequel to this, is even better, and one just has to keep watching. I really love the dango daikazoku song that is the epitome of the pure sweetness of this anime. It always reminds me of my family and it is impossible not to smile whenever it starts playing. It is so cute and happy and full of hope and love!

なかよしだんご 手をつなぎ 大きなまるい轮になるよ
町をつくり だんご星の上 みんなで笑いあうよ
うさぎもそらで手をふってみてる でっかいおつきさま
うれしいこと 悲しいことも 全部まるめて <3

My favourite episode thus far is #14, because it touched me so deeply, and I will never forget the meaning behind this message.

And this scene; of family and friendship, the garden of memories, and the origins of this world.

You must not deny your eyes the beauty of this world.

This world is composed of countless harps that cannot be seen by the naked eyes.

The world is filled with harps,and each one plays a different tune.

All those tunes intertwine with each other and a unique melody is born.

That's why the world is so beautiful.

- Kotomi's father, Clannad #13 (Allusion to the String Theory?)

Wassup yo says 'that rocked!'

I just discovered the new blogger template designer and was fiddling around and trying out the different pretty backgrounds that they have! I have this penchant for customizing interfaces, like my Firefox, Hotmail, Gmail, and even my Windows cursor - which takes the notorious form of a peeling banana. Personalizing stuff with my favourite designs and icons just makes me very happy! Just a while ago, I was quite torn between this pinky background and the following:

The clouds are so cute and cheerful! They also fit in with the entire cloudy theme. I don't know why I decided to choose the pink one in the end either. Maybe it was because I was drawn by how the shades of pink complemented the blue and green tones in the top banner perfectly, and it was the first background that I really liked. Nevertheless, right after I've saved the changes to the template, I began to recall what my original layout looked like, and I wanted to compare and see if this one is indeed nicer. But I didn't have it saved, and it seems that the change is irreversible. Now this looks a little strange and I already miss my original template. I'm such a creature of habit.

It's been about  two weeks since I've started my studentship at a lab in MRC Harwell, which is this place in Oxfordshire. I finally got to witness for myself some of the technologies and advancements that I've always only read or heard about in textbooks, papers and in lectures, and it is just fascinating. It is like knowledge comes alive and there you are, staring it in the eye. I always get impressed - perhaps too easily - by the ingenuity behind the many discoveries, inventions and theories that have propelled science and technology to today's standpoint. It is inspiring how so many tasks that were once deemed impossible have been proven to be possible. Will the cure for cancer be found one day? Will the secrets underlying the intricacies of the human brain be unraveled, and will we eventually be able to reconstruct it artificially? More 'absurdly', will time travel happen, just as Stephen Hawking predicts? I'm so curious for all the answers. The funny thing is, if I were born in an era where time travel is possible, I'll probably be wondering if teleportation will be rendered possible one day. There will never be an end to these questions, and the issues that we contemplate now will always be dictated by our passage in time. As we get empowered by the idea that nothing is impossible, we expect more and more, and it seems almost too easy to take the advancements of mankind for granted, too easy to brush everything aside matter-of-factly, as a mere natural progression. But if we just stop to think about that man who landed on the moon despite it being such an incredulous idea at that time, or that airplane that took its flight just like a bird after such painstaking effort was invested into it, it is clearly sublime that these are all miracles that have taken place to transform today's reality. I don't quite know what I'm trying to get at, my thoughts are in a mess. But maybe it's that in this never-ending quest for progress that humans have embarked on, it is worthwhile to stop and take a rest, to live for the moment's splendour and to appreciate the current context, instead of solely getting caught up with all the promise that the future appears to hold, for it can blind us to where we're headed, and then everything would lose its meaning.

I've intended to write a bit about my experience at Harwell and about Oxfordshire, and look how I've digressed so terribly. I actually started another entry a few days ago about my sister's wedding, but I started watching black&white, got addicted and just forgot about the blog entry. I'm going to watch the show now! It's super intense and exciting!